


Mary's Son (Cast Lots Upon Goats Remix)

by ignipes



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-09
Updated: 2009-09-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:25:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the man Sam Winchester was always meant to become.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mary's Son (Cast Lots Upon Goats Remix)

**Author's Note:**

> Remix of "What Happens To a Dream Deferred" by britmart_is (http://britomart-is.livejournal.com/44689.html).

Mary's son is chubby and healthy. He gurgles in greeting and flinches with surprise when the warm drops of blood strike his lips.

But he is hungry. Human children always are.

Azazel is almost disappointed when Mary interrupts. She has spirit, he can't deny that, but the look she gives him, the shock in her voice, it's as though she didn't expect him to hold up his end of the deal.

He finds it heartbreaking that humans have so little faith. He remembers a time when humans knew what a promise meant.

He doesn't want to kill her, but it's easy enough to bring forth the flames, to fill the nursery with raging smoke and light, to leave the inferno and watch from a neighbor's yard as Mary's firstborn brat emerges from the house with the infant in his arms.

It was careless of her, Azazel thinks, to breed when she knew what was coming.

He scowls when Mary's hulking husband stumbles from the burning house as well. He's not the same skinny kid she held in her arms that day when she swore a vow.

Azazel always thought Mary could do so much better. There's no accounting for taste.

He takes his leave before the neighbors wake and the sirens wail. He'll be back in a few years to check up on Mary's son.

-

There is nothing more satisfying than learning that your human stock is doing most of the work for you.

Azazel slips into the body of Sam Winchester's ninth grade English teacher. The man's mind is small and terrified, cowering like a rat in a room full of tomcats, but he is not without useful information. Azazel wraps the teacher's mind tight in a prison of fear and stands before a room full of the very worst of God's creation: human teenagers.

Teaching isn't so hard, not after spending millenia in Hell.

Sam Winchester sits in the classroom and says not a word, barely lifting his eyes from his desk while Azazel spends the entire forty minutes lecturing about verb tenses and wondering how the boy's dour expression would change if he knew who stood before him.

_Your mother gave you to me,_ Azazel thinks fondly.

But Sam does not raise his eyes.

When the children are gone and the school's hallways echo with their nightly emptiness, Azazel sits at the desk of the teacher whose body he wears and looks for something diverting to read. It doesn't take long to find something that catches his attention:

"What I Did On My Summer Vacation, by Sam Winchester."

Azazel smiles. Every mouth feels different, every body new, but he knows the shape of a smile no matter what guise he wears.

"Werewolves and shotguns and stitches, oh my," he murmurs with a chuckle.

Mary would be so very proud.

-

Azazel has business to attend to elsewhere. It takes him across the world, through lives and deaths, through bodies used and discarded like so many spent shells. But he always returns to Mary's son.

He watches through the eyes of a waitress as Sam argues with his father over pancakes and the other son pretends not to hear. He drops by cemeteries and empty highways to check on their progress, to see what creature of the night the Winchester family is intent upon destroying now. He wears the body of a comely cheerleader and enjoys the jealous glares of both Sam and his brother, and he laughs to himself at how plainly they wear their hearts on their sleeves.

Azazel doesn't worry that Sam's father will find him. The man is sick with obsession, mad with purpose, but he is looking in the wrong place. He looks in shadows when he should look into the eyes of his neighbor; he glowers at the insubordination of his younger son when he should he relishing the warrior Sam is becoming.

It is bad form to have favorites, but Mary's son is so darn appealing Azazel finds he can't help himself.

-

When the times comes for Sam to make a choice, the first of many, Azazel borrows the body of a drunken bum to watch the boy buy a midnight bus ticket to Phoenix. Ticket in hand, Sam is restless and sullen; he eats candy that churns in his stomach and paces the small, warm waiting area.

Azazel watches through slitted eyes. The odors of vomit and spilled whiskey keep Sam from coming too close, but he is close enough for Azazel to smell his fear, to feel the tight, bright light of hope dwindling the longer he waits.

One hours passes, then two. Azazel makes a bet with himself that Mary's son will break before the third is up, but Sam proves more stubborn than he expected.

After the fourth hour is over, he bolts from the bus station like his shoes are on fire. He takes his bag with him.

But his hope, his dreams, his plans for a life free of blood and violence, disentangled from his clinging, wretched family, those Sam Winchester leaves behind.

-

Mary's son is smarter than he looks.

"Who are you?" he asks. His voice is belligerent with the wariness of the young. Even in his dreams, anger and distrust seethe from every word.

Names have power, and while Azazel may have shared his blood with this boy and cherishes him like his own son, he does not give his name to hunters.

"It doesn't matter who I am, Sammy," Azazel says. Even in Sam's dream-mind, he feels the boy flinch at the use of his brother's nickname for him. "The question you should be asking is: who are _you_?"

-

Azazel loves humans as much as he hates them. They are filthy, ugly little creatures, weak and mewling and helpless, spewing their wretchedness across a world that should be built upon the Lightbringer's power and glory.

He loves them because they surrender their humanity so easily.

Give a human child a taste of power, and there is no knowing where he will go with it.

Ansem and Andy take joy in manipulating others as skillfully as Azazel's demon kin. Max lives and breathes pain and fear, and when they no longer sustain him he turns to vengeance. Ava, in the playground of Cold Oak, she sheds her normalcy as readily as a snake sheds a skin; Azazel is impressed with her and the enthusiasm with which she embraces her potential. Jake is a killer in his bones, always has been, although he buries it beneath a uniform and hides behind the orders of politicians and liars.

But Sam...

Azazel has no doubt who will win the showdown at Cold Oak. It is child's play, a mere formality. Azazel knows who is strongest.

Sam is special. Sam has been trained to kill since childhood. Sam almost left – but he didn't. Sam knows the taste of his own blood, the scents of gun oil burning flesh, the terror of facing death and escaping stronger, faster, better than before. Sam hates his father, and as his hatred grows the more similar they become. Sam fucks his brother with the taste of others on his tongue, sweat slicked on his skin, and he proudly leaves bruises and bite marks behind.

Sam listens to the voice of a stranger in his dreams. He craves approval he does not trust, yearns for it like the mother's touch he never knew, the father's praise he never earned. He does not believe he is destined for greater things, but he hopes to achieve them anyway. He weeps for a soul he fears is already lost.

Sam Winchester is so very human.

"Sammy," Azazel says, dream-walking while Sam sleeps restlessly in an abandoned building in a dead, gray town, "you're my favorite. You've always been my favorite."

This time, Sam believes it.


End file.
